This article examines how cybercrime in the form of a man-in-the-middle attack (MITM) can be dealt with in terms of liability law. It is limited to the question recently addressed in numerous judgements: how should a payment made by the victim of fraud to a hacker be assessed under civil law, where the hacker has hacked into another persons IT system and is using it to communicate with the victim? This contributes to the numerous judgements handed down in recent years, which have failed to come up with a convincing solution. At the same time, the legal concept of acting under a false name in the digital sphere is outlined in more detail.
Long-term and organizational contracts are necessarily incomplete. German private law primarily fills gaps through default rules and supplementary interpretation. This article argues that both operate today as normatively constrained gap-fillers rather than as tools to reconstruct a subjective hypothetical will. This functional convergence is important: default rules reflect legislative choices and should prevail prima facie. From an intertemporal perspective, new default law applies ex nunc to ongoing relationships, whereas interpretation focuses on the moment of formation. The Article therefore proposes a dynamic reference point.
German law is one of the many legal orders that distinguish between parentage and adoption. The German Civil Code of 1900 was drafted in such a way that parentage and adoption were treated in many respects as contraries of one another. Since then, some of the former distance between parentage and adoption has been bridged in the respective doctrines. The history of the guiding concepts behind parentage and adoption is marked by their convergence over time. This realization suggests that it is worth considering whether to subsume adoption and parentage under a single, unified legal institution.
